Earlier this week, we ran a story on GoboLinux, and the distribution's effort to replace the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard with a more pleasant, human-readable, and logical design. A lot of people liked the idea of modernising/replacing the FHS, but just as many people were against doing so. Valid arguments were presented both ways, but in this article, I would like to focus on a common sentiment that came forward in that discussion: normal users shouldn't see the FHS, and advanced users are smart enough to figure out how the FHS works.

We aren't talking about fixing driver bugs. Software is so complex that you're losing view of the difference between things we're talking about and things we aren't talking about. We are talking about the design of the file system and maintainence relating to file locations.

So for instance, if your settings break you should be able to just copy them from /settings on your backup disk to /settings on your system disk. We're not talking about fixing bugs in code.